Wednesday, April 8, 2009

Micromanagers

The corollary to the item I posted in September about emotional intelligence is the Micromanager. A cancer if ever there was one on the organization and social life in general. The micromanager has a pathology that causes great harm to individuals, organizations and groups.

Psychopaths succeed in conventional society in large measure because few of us grasp that they are fundamentally different from ourselves. We assume that they, too, care about other people's feelings. This makes it easier for them to "play" us. Although they lack empathy, they develop an actor's expertise in evoking ours. While they don't care about us, "they have an element of emotional intelligence, of being able to see our emotions very clearly and manipulate them," says Michael Maccoby, a psychotherapist who has consulted for major corporations."

That sums it up pretty well. Yes, I am implying that a micromanager is a psychopath. You can not act in a normal fasion with a micromanager, the rules of the game are not the same.